Reference on Numbers of Saxons

David L. White dlwhite at texas.net
Thu Nov 30 04:17:09 UTC 2000


> Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with
> the differences in linguistic results.

        Any theory of the development of English has to deal with the
difference of result in English versus the other Germanic languages:  in
general, English has apparent Celticisms, which appear in the North and
West, whereas the rest of Germanic in general does not.

> On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally
> linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords,
> little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance.  In fact, it
> was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim
> invasions.  It lasted much better in the Crimea!

        The main difference is that Romance was high-prestige, whereas
Brittonic was low-prestige.  Prestige matters.

> In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear,
> but the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was
> singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary.  About 14 Celtic
> loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic
> of the period.

        The idea the grammatical influence must be accompanied by lexical
influence is false, as is repeatedly noted by Thomason and Kaufman, esp p.
21.  This has been pretty widely known since Jakobson or before, though
apparently it has not filtered down to everybody.  There is, all things
being equal, simply no reason for words to be borrowed, in large numbers,
from a low-prestige language into a high-prestige language.  Furthermore,
the number of "Celtic" loanwords in non-standard dialects of English in the
northwest is about 200, which is not remarkably low.

> In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a
> remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible
> with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention
> the nascent Scandinavian tongues.  Which is why English missionaries were so
> important in the conversion of the continental Germans.

        Old English is not "remarkably conservative" for an Od Germanic
language.   It is fairly typical.  Judging by the fact that Old Icelandic,
which is contemporaneous with Middle English, is about as conservative as
Old English, if anything North Germanic at the time of Old English would
seem to be worthy of being termed "remarkably conservative".

> And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of
> Old English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone
> and which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws
> of Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social
> group within the kingdom.

        The differences between OE dialects are fairly minor, as is to be
expected if an elite had (in most of the country) spread itself fairly
thinly over a subject population in fairly recent times, as time is measured
in linguistics.

> The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period
> of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech.  Since Anglo-Saxon
> in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a
> multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery
> language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate.  In
> fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of
> either language being conscious of it.

        It is classes that matter, not written chancery languages.  That the
Old Germanic languages had well-developed notions of linguistic propriety is
evident from the very well-developed (or even artificial) poetic diction,
complete with archaic "poetic" words.   "Pre-literate" is not logically or
practically equivalent to "unsophisticated" or "egalitarian".

> Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian
> Indian influence on the English of New England!  Indian place-names and
> loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely
> brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact
> between the incomers and the indigenous people.

> The place-names tell the same story.  They become common only in the western
> fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in
> British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries.  And even there, they're
> often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill".

        Conquerors don't have to accept native place-names if they don't
want to.  The matter is quite open to fashion.

> We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of
> post-Roman Britain.  Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period --
> 4th century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more.

> By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually
> good historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million
> people; and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon
> to be steady expansion.

        Since WWII, aerial surveys have indicated that the population of
early AS Britain was quite a lot higher than it had been traditional to
assert.  I seriously doubt that there was any great change.  Even a
population of one million is high to have been composed primarily of the
descendants of continental Saxons, since these can hardly have numbered more
than fifty thousand.  There is no evidence for any massive depoplation on
the continent such as would have been required for the traditional view of
the AS population's origins to be correct.   It appears that only a thin
costal strip was depopulated (this is confirmed by Bede), in part because it
was sinking.

> Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the
> transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods.  For example, as
> late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources
> of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from
> closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old.

> These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the
> curved timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at
> precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the
> Romano-British level.

        So there was still some climax forest around as of 1050.  That
hardly proves anything with regard to relations betweenn Anglo-Saxon and
Brittonic.

        Here are some partial semi-formal references on people who seem to
be, as we speak, scooping me on the matter of Celtic influence in English.
(I did my own work in 1987, by the way.)

Tristram, Hildegard C.  1999.  "How Celtic is English"
Tristram, Hildegard C., ed.  2000.  "Celtic Englishes II"
German, Gary.  2000.  "Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and Scholars:  19th
Century Attitudes Towards the Survival of Britons in AngloSaxon
England", in "Celtic Englishes II."
Venneman, Theo.  2000.  "Atlantis Semitica:  Structural Contact
Features in Celtic and English." in "Historical Linguistics 1999:
Selected Papers from th 14th International Conference on
Historical     Linguistics.
Venneman, Theo.  2000.  "English as a Celtic Language", in Celtic
Englishes II.

        I would suggest that anyone attempting to make a serious
contribution to this emerging issue submit matter for publication in the
usual manner, after having read these and many other works, rather than
discussing it on the IE list.  That is what I am (somewhat sporadically)
trying to do.  And I could have sworn that this discussion was closed after
I pointed out that the traditional interpretation rests fundamentally on a
view of the early Germans and their supposed glory and superiority that
could quite appropriately be called "Proto-Nazi".  So why do I find myself
typing in the same references again?

                                                          Dr. David L. White

[ Moderator's note:
  The discussion that was closed off was one in which reaction to the term
  "Proto-Nazi" was the point of the posting, rather than reasoned discussion
  of Dr. White's original claims.

  There is a corollary to Godwin's Rule, that when the words "Nazi" or "Hitler"
  are used in order to force the rule's invocation, the rule does not apply.

  Discussion of the linguistic and archaeological evidence for the various
  models of the spread of Anglo-Saxon at the expense of Celtic and Latin are
  on-topic for this list; further discussion of the putative reasons for 19th
  Century interpretations of the evidence then available belong on a list
  devoted to the History of Science, and will not be welcomed here.
  --rma ]



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